


when your soul is too big for your bones

by 26stars



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, ah look I'm back to my roots, aka: what the canon demands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-28 18:43:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15712899
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/26stars/pseuds/26stars
Summary: Daisy has tried to get May to leave her before. She hasn't pulled it off yet.From a tumblr request for May+Daisy+ butterfly kiss[Title from a poem by inkskinned which I currently can't find to link]





	when your soul is too big for your bones

**Author's Note:**

  * For [agentmmayy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/agentmmayy/gifts).



> So, "butterfly kiss" sounds like the kind of prompt that results in something sweet and fluffy, but I apparently can't stay away from angst for long. This scene in season 4 both broke my heart and pissed me off because the writers made it all about Coulson and Lincoln instead of letting these two have some very appropriate sympathy and desperately-needed consolation. 
> 
> So I'm fixing it.

Daisy’s arm is still throbbing when May finds her in the quinjet.

The bones in her arms have been aching long enough in the past few months that her baseline level of pain has been ratcheted up a few permanent notches. She doesn’t know when she stopped noticing the background ache as her bones fissured under the stress of her quakes, but the actual break in her ulna will not tolerate being ignored. Coulson had sent Simmons up to the jet to check on her, to offer her pain medicine and convince her to come in for X-rays. Jemma, at least, could clearly see that the latter effort was a lost cause, and Daisy had turned down the narcotics. After everything she’d stolen from SHIELD in the past six months, it only seemed fair.

When she hears soft footsteps on the stairs up to the docked plane, Daisy knows it must be the person she was expecting to see next, and she isn’t trying very hard to be quiet.

She’s letting Daisy get ready to face her.

A deep-seated fear swells involuntarily in Daisy’s chest, and she actively pushes down on it.

_This is not one of the nuns coming to punish you for your latest infraction._

_This is not some foster mom coming to tell you that you’re not welcome in their home anymore._

May is definitely disappointed and probably pissed and both are perfectly justified. But if nothing else, Daisy can reach for comfort in the fact that May’s not allowed to tell her to leave. If nothing else, Coulson’s orders ought to trump May’s resentment.

“If you’re looking for Robbie, he’s off hating himself somewhere else,” she says as her S.O. comes into view.

“I was looking for _you_ ,” May responds calmly, reaching the level where Daisy is sitting and pausing a few feet from her.

“The arm is fine,” Daisy mutters, keeping her gaze down, again offering an easy exit.

“I didn’t ask,” May says, folding her arms and leaning back against the plane’s interior.

Daisy tries to hold out, but it’s not long before she caves under the weight of May’s stare.

“I know what you’re doing,” the woman says when Daisy finally meets her eyes. “Trying to distance yourself from everyone around you so they don’t drown in your wake? I _invented_ that move. It doesn’t work. I told you before.”

_You want to give up, live in a box? Go ahead. But that hurt stays in there with you._

“What do you want me to do?” Daisy says quietly, hoping she looks as pathetic as she feels, hoping May will have a little mercy. “Suck it up keep marching?”

May holds her gaze. “Tell me what _you_ want.”

It’s not the response Daisy was expecting, and her confused pause surely lets May know it. She swallows hard and looks down at her hands, scuffed and battered from the fights she’s hurled herself into in the past month, and curls her fingers into half-hearted fists.

_I want Lincoln back._

_I want to undo the past._

_I want things to go back to when they were easier._

_I want us to forget everything bad that happened in the past year._

_I want to make right everything I made wrong._

She knows those things are all impossible, but under all of them ripples a common truth.

“I just want everything to stop hurting.”

She knows what those words sound like. She’d be lying if she said she hadn’t considered it at least once in the past year. An easy exit, a quick ending…

But even in her lowest moments, she knew she couldn’t do that.

_Andrew and Lincoln are dead so that you could make it this far._

_And you don’t deserve an easy way out._

“And what if I tell you that it never will?”

May’s question draws Daisy’s gaze upwards again. There’s sadness in her eyes, but Daisy can’t find disappointment. May looks instead like someone who actually sincerely, sympathizes.

“What if I told you that it will always hurt—it will just hurt differently in the future? Less, eventually, but not for a while? Does that mean the only thing worth doing is signing up for every suicide mission that comes your way?”

Daisy thinks of the years the Cavalry spent in SHIELD’s administrative sector.

“Would you rather I stayed behind a desk?”

May moves then, unfolding her arms and slowly crossing the space between them.

“That’s your decision to make. But this? Running away from people who didn’t tell you to leave? Locking yourself in with demons and telling your friends to leave you to them? That’s never going to work, because we’re not going to give up on you.”

May has closed the distance by then, and she sits down beside Daisy on the cold metal floor. Daisy can’t face her, bowing her head and smearing a tear away.

“I never wanted that.”

_Liar._

“Well, good thing we don’t get to choose who cares about us.”

_Bad liar._

There are self-pitying things that Daisy wants to say in response to that—to remind May of the years of foster families behind her, of the murderous father, of the obsessed ex, of the dead boyfriend—things that all make her wish she could have made some people care more, or care less…

But May just leans back against the wall beside Daisy and slips an arm around her shoulders, reminding Daisy that this is one person whose care and compassion she’d once craved with an embarrassing desperation, who she had always hoped would be the one to track her down and turned out to be the one who sent Coulson and Mack her way in the first place…

The one who didn’t abandon her in the prison today.

The one who isn’t leaving her in her prison now either.

One gentle tug is all it takes for May to pull Daisy closer, and she closes her laptop as she rests her head on May’s shoulder and feels the woman’s face against her hair. Her arm is still throbbing, but Daisy can still feel May’s lashes flutter as she bows her head over Daisy’s like a blessing or a butterfly kiss.

_Want to give up, live in a box? Go ahead. The hurt stays with you._

But thankfully, that’s not all that stays.


End file.
